Welcome!

I am an assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information
Science at Northeastern University. My research is primarily in the areas of distributed systems and
networking, with a recent focus on mobile systems. Much of my work
entails crowdsourcing measurement and performance evaluation of
Internet systems by deploying software to users at the scale of tens
or hundreds of thousands of users. To date, more than 1 million users
have installed software produced from my research and more than 15
research groups worldwide have integrated my datasets into their
research projects. Please click around to check out more details about
me and my work.

News

Prospective students! I am currently
looking to admit Ph.D. students starting in the Fall 2018. Please see this page
for more information. Also, I am recruiting graduate and undergraduate students
who are interested in privacy, anonymity, security, network transparency, and building mobile systems.

2/12/18 First update of the new year. Just a few things happened...

Our Wehe app for detecting net neutrality violations got quite a bit of attention, in large part due to Apple rejecting our app and then later reversing its decision. Our work was subsequently covered by dozens of news outlets, and a piece about net neutrality featuring this work appeared on VICE News. Thanks to this publicity we have received over 100,000 tests worldwide, and we will be updating our website with our findings as we process the data.

I testified to the Massachusetts State Senate Committee on Net Neutrality and Consumer Protection, you can find coverage here.

Arash Molavi Kakhki, my recently graduated PhD student, won the IRTF's Applied Networking Research Prize for his work on QUIC that was published at IMC 2017.

A first look at in-flight WiFi (joint work with Northwestern) was accepted to WWW'18.

I led a panel on tools for data transparency at the DTL'17 conference, featuring Ashkan Soltani, Kashmir Hill, Justin Brookman, Franck Baudot, and Andrea Martens.

ReCon was awarded a grant from the Comcast Innovation Fund.

Wehe, our tool for detecting net neutrality violations, has been selected by ARCEP (the French telecom regulator) for providing consumers in France the ability to monitor and report ISPs that unlawfully differentiate network traffic.

More exciting news to report in 2018!

10/30/17 Excited to report that I will have two papers appearing at NDSS 2018! "Bug Fixes, Improvements, ... and Privacy Leaks - A Longitudinal Study of PII Leaks Across Android App Versions" -- joint work with UCSB, U of Helsinki and IMDEA/ICSI -- explores how app privacy leaks change over time. "Automated Attack Discovery in TCP Congestion Control Using a Model-guided Approach" -- joint work with Purdue and FIU -- combines the generality of implementation-agnostic fuzzing with the precision of runtime analysis to find attacks against implementations of TCP congestion control.

9/8/17 I gave a talk about DPI middleboxes and their implications for policymakers at TPRC 45. Read my paper on the topic here.

8/21/17 The Harvest documentary film, which is based on data gathered from the ReCon Project, is now available online for free! This short film (11 minutes) appeared at several presitigious film festivals, including Aspen Shortsfest, HotDocs, Seattle International Film Festival, and Rooftop Films summer series.

"Understanding the Role of Registrars in DNSSEC Deployment" (with Maryland, Duke/Akamai, University of Twente)

"The Record Route Option is an Option!" (with Rutgers/USC/Columbia/Microsoft and Waikato)

More details to come after camera-ready versions are prepared.

6/23/17 Many updates after a long hiatus.

Harvest will appear at Rooftop Films in NYC, where we will be running an interactive event using ReCon. It's a free event, register here.

Our paper on studying DNSSEC and its improper deployments was accepted to USENIX Security. This completes my first-ever "cycle" for top security conferences (CCS, NDSS, Oakland, USENIX). Wouldn't have been able to do it without the my ridiculously talented collaborators.

4/26/17 After a successful world premiere in Aspen, the Harvest documentary film will have its international premeiere at the HotDocs Film Festival in Toronto this weekend!

3/14/17 Thrilled to announce that Harvest, a documentary film that used our ReCon project to identify and highlight privacy risks when using mobile apps, will be premiering at the Aspen Film Festival in April!

2/14/17 Renata Teixeira (Inria) and I were awarded a Google Faculty Research Award for our proposal on diagnoising and improving QoE. Thanks, Google!

2/9/17 Our work on efficiently and scalably pushing all revocations to browsers was accepted to IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2017! This is joint work with the lead author (and undergraduate) James Larisch along with Christo Wilson, Alan Mislove, Dave Levin (UMD), and Bruce Maggs (Duke/Akamai).

Cetera

For those who don't know me, the following passage has become a theme
that runs through my life. In short, I "push the rock," just like Sisyphus from Greek
mythology. But Camus tells it better:

As for this myth, one
sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge
stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees
the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder
bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start
with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted
hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and
time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the
stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will
have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the
plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests
me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see
that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the
torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a
breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the
hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the
heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is
superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.